ABSTRACT
To the founder of the Roman Empire and his successors relations between East and West meant relations between the eastern and western parts of a whole, the pars orientalis and the pars occidentalis of the unified structure of the empire. Even at the moment of the empire's birth, however, there was already a clear idea of where the Latin West ended and the Greek East began. The Roman historian Appian tells us that when, in 44 bc, Octavian and Mark Antony divided the world between them, they drew a line down their map from north to south. In the early centuries of the Christian Roman Empire the rivalry between the Old Rome of the West and the New Rome of Constantinople was tempered by the reactions of the great cities and patriarchates of Antioch and Alexandria. So long as East and West were restricted to communicating by sea their contacts were necessarily limited.
